Off Grid

What is OFF-GRID Anyways?
Lately the term off grid has seen a lot of press. Many people are asking what the hell off-grid is anyways.
The answer varies greatly depending on geographical location. The original meaning, referred to homes located away from power utility reach or when residents chose to live without benefit of being connected to the power grid.

Well that was back in the sixties. Before then people either had electricity or not but it was not defined as being off Grid.

I grew up in the region where Niagara Falls has been providing electric power to a large area around it for decades.As the power lines were expanded outwards and reached other towns where small independent hydro-electric dams also existed.Gradually these smaller towns  were integrated into the larger power distribution system which the electrical engineers began referring to it as "THE GRID".

Meanwhile a program of rural electrification expanded the reach of the utility power lines to reach much of the province.The benefits derived from economies of scale an expanded road networks quickly brought the rural communities closer to the cities in terms of material benifits, better living standards and convenience.

By the sixties Ontario Hydro had built links to Upstate New York which also derived a great deal of power from the Niagra Falls Power Turbines. The great  black out of the North East served to highlight the vulnerability of such grid connections and this is when we really began to hear the term "grid" in the press.Over the following decades the inter-connection of seperate power utilities spread and we heard the term grid more often.

Somewhere along the line isolated communities and homes were bypassed and remained as stand alone power users who had to rely entirelyon there own resources.

It was not until I moved to the Province of British Columbia and began working for a company that designed and manufactured "inverters" that I began hearing the term " off-grid" with any regularity.

Until that time I associated inverter use mostly with RV and Marine use. I was amazed to learn some homes did not have any electrical power until the mid sixties, and even more amazed to learn some of them still do not have electrical service from a municipal utility company in the year 2000.

During the past decade the term " Off-Grid" mutated to define itself as a political as well as a practical engineering term. Some people,disenchanted with the political and societal developments chose to withdraw from the environment and start over. Until the sixties, only Old Order Mennonites and the Amish chose to live without the use of electricity. Then we saw the development of hippie communes.

Necessity rather than desire often compelled them to locate their communes far away from areas served by the power utilities although some found land that was.

As early as the seventies I was involved with designing and building wind generators for isolated homes where electric utility power was not avaliable but in those days we still did not refer to them as "off-grid".That came later.

The hippie movement gradually fell by the wayside to be replaced by people who simply wished to remove themselves from the increasingly toxic and polarized political climate evolving in North America. In addition there were more people who chose to move away from urban blight and overcrowded suburia.

Serviced land rapidly escalated in price, leaving the majority to seek a new homestead far from any services including electric power.This movement provided the demand for independent power not to mention other utilities such as water and sewer provisions. When I first encountered inverters, a 1000 watt unit was considered huge.

These days, 3000 watt inverters are normal and often we see 5000 or more watts. With such an inverter an isolated home can function almost as if it was connected to the grid provided you had the means to generate the powere to feed the inverter.

Before inverters were developed as a consumer product the only way to have power was to run a motor driven generator continuously. This was a costly exercise and few could afford it. It was still off-grid but expensive.

Along comes the political activists and declare that if you use any sort of municipal service, be it water, sewer, natural gas, or electricity then you are still connected to the grid and thus part of the problem as far as they are concerned. In order to make a valid political statement, you had to completly dissaciate from society and the services provided by municipal organizations. BALDERDASH!

Some extremists even go so far as to say if you use propane in tanks or fuel a generator with gasoline or diesel you are still tenuously connected to the grid. They embrace solar and wind as the only true " off-grid" power source of merit because it is not a grid supplied service.

I  would argue that if using propane is considered part of the grid then so is using high tech solar panels, inverters or wind power. All of these alternative energy methods involve a sizeable electronic manufactoring process, all of which is dependent on the very systems and services eschewed by these new off-grid activists.

It may be politically incorrect but |I will continue to define " off-grid "only as not being connected to the electric grid.